Tuesday, May 2, 2017

I Got Lost: A Review Of The New Afghan Whigs Album

I can't say that I was ever a huge Afghan Whigs fan. I mean, I'd liked certain releases in the past but I wasn't really actively following the band's ups and downs. However, I can say that I'm now going to do just that as the band's new album, In Spades, out on Sub Pop on Friday, is just so good that to not see what comes next would be to rob yourself of something special.

Here on In Spades, The Afghan Whigs -- Greg Dulli, guitarists Dave Rosser and Jon Skibic, drummer Patrick Keeler, multi-instrumentalist Rick Nelson, and Whigs co-founder/bassist John Curley -- unveil a kind of music that easily defies simple genre categorization. From the funky strut of opener "Birdland" and onto the weird Zeppelin-recalling "Arabian Heights", a listener is reassured that the fire of this band never diminished. That's a cornball thing to say but The Afghan Whigs have survived and outlasted so many waves -- college rock to post-grunge to indie and on and on -- and yet they've somehow managed to retain the ability to make material that sounds so fresh and original even now. Sure, bits of "Copernicus" reveal a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds fix on Dulli's part, and "Light as a Feather" recalls both the Stones and (oddly) early Aerosmith, but to nitpick on the influences seeping through the tunes here is to ignore the consummate skill that Dulli and crew have in making such soulful -- in a real way -- and fiery songs. "I Got Lost" sounds like "Desire"-era U2 done right, an approximation of white boy blues done with a real sense of conviction and intent.

And that is perhaps why In Spades is so, so good. Older and wiser now, Dulli is no longer some young upstart trying to approximate the sound of some legendary soul singer; he is, in a weird way, a legendary soul singer and he's imbued the 10 tracks here on In Spades with a helluva lot of emotion. There's nothing ironic or detached in this music, and nothing fake either. Dulli and the players have created what could be their most consistent release.

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About Me

I write about stuff I like.
Born in Washington, D.C., in 1967, I spent most of my life in Maryland before I moved to Hong Kong at the very end of 2011. I worked in Kowloon, and lived on Lamma Island, for nearly 3 years, and then I moved back to Maryland with my wife at the end of August 2014. When I was younger, I worked in 3 record stores in College Park, Maryland, from 1987 to 1990 and those jobs gave me a lot of joy, as well as a musical education. I was once a huge fan of the cinema of Hong Kong, especially Shaw Brothers titles. An Anglophile, I still gravitate to British films and music. My youth was spent on Marvel comics, and Starlog and Famous Monsters magazines; Universal and Hammer horror movies; the work of Ray Harryhausen; classic American films of the 1930s; Hanna-Barbera cartoons; music from the glory days of American AM radio; lousy TV reruns; Mego toys; and Godzilla flicks...